Computing transitive closure of bipolar weighted digraphs

  • Authors:

  • Patrick Niesink;Keven Poulin;Mateja ŠAjna

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • Discrete Applied Mathematics
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

We define a bipolar weighted digraph as a weighted digraph together with the sign function on the arcs such that the weight of each arc lies between 0 and 1, and no two parallel arcs have the same sign. Bipolar weighted digraphs are utilized to model so-called fuzzy cognitive maps, which are used in science, engineering, and the social sciences to represent the causal structure of a body of knowledge. It has been noted in the literature that a transitive closure of a bipolar weighted digraph contains useful new information for the fuzzy cognitive map it models. In this paper we ask two questions: what is a sensible and useful definition of transitive closure of a bipolar weighted digraph, and how do we compute it? We give two answers to each of these questions, that is, we present two distinct models. First, we give a review of the fuzzy digraph model, which has been, in a different form and less rigorously, studied previously in the fuzzy systems literature. Second, we carefully develop a probabilistic model, which is related to the notion of network reliability. This paper is intended for a mathematical audience.